November 1, 2011

As Internet becomes mainstream and stupid people start using it (perhaps "nontechnical" would be better in many contexts, but in this case I believe "stupid" is more accurate), services must cater to the needs of the stupid. That's what happened at Google, who, apparently around 2009, started to search for "what the user meant" instead of what the user actually told them to search.

Now, this might be helpful in many cases, but it just so happens that I'm smart enough to recognize when bad search results are my fault, and if I search for a term, I want the search engine to give me the results for that damn term.

The Plus operator used to do that - if you're looking for "FindErr" and not "finder", just type "+FindErr" and it will give you what you wish. Alas, not any more: because of Google+, plus operator is used to search for people on G+. Now, instead, you have to put quotes around the word. Baaaah.

So anyway, I'm not the only one who is unhappy about this, and some people have already taken action. That's what the FindErr.org search engine is about. You type a sane search string, and it makes it all quotey before passing on to Google. Now if only there was a way to make this search the default in Chrome (or Chromium), my favourite browser.